hi, i am a long time (20 years) opensource enthusiast and developer, i really like the Hugo project, and am about to convert several WordPress and Jekyll sites into it.
since my concern is to be futureproof for decades, not just years, i’m just a bit worried about two things:
i don’t know much about GO community… is it a language that is here to stay for long? as i’m sure that the node.js and JS technology will be here for long, but what about GO, and so the Hugo binaries? (i’m really tempted about a JS solution …)
it seems most of the Hugo dev is in the hand of really few people… is the community strong enough to support an eventual change in the core team? i know for example that behind Jekyll there is GitHub… if a day Olivia will resign it’ll be GitHub itself to cover the missing role, since Jekyll runs millions of GitHub Pages… what about here?
i’ve seen too many open source projects die in latest years…
i know that it’ll be always easy to migrate from Hugo to any other static site generator… that’s why for example i’m not using TOML front matters at all, but just YAML which is quite the standard… and try to structure my contents as agnostic as possible…
This might be comforting: hugo releases contain statically linked binaries. So once you download a binary and have your site running with it, there is no reason to upgrade if you don’t want future features or your site doesn’t need any bug fixes.
So theoretically, that binary will work as long as the OS/platform for which you downloaded that binary exists.
i don’t know much about GO community… is it a language that is here to stay for long?
All I know is that Google is backing Go.
as i’m sure that the node.js and JS technology will be here for long,
I wouldn’t be sure about anything.
but what about GO, and so the Hugo binaries?
what about the binaries? They are statically linked. So if they work once, they will work forever on that OS/arch.
PS: I am not a Go coder (rather a Nim and Emacs-Lisp fan), but hugo still is very much the best SSG solution for me.
I agree with everything @kaushalmodi said. I use Hugo with some very large organizations that choose Hugo for its stability, among other reasons. You’re right to use YAML, and I would add that you’d want to minimize your use of shortcodes, but that’s not hard.
Go is here to stay. Not only is it backed by Google, but it’s beloved by those who use it, at least everyone I’ve ever met.
Go is future proof (it is slowly turning into the server language of internet), and Hugo’s static binaries certainly is. If nothing dramatic happens with Linux etc.'s syscalls, you can use the same single binary for decades to come – which can not be said about the NPM based (GatsbyJS and friends) and Jekyll.
Go is used by Google, Netflix, Amazon and others. Beside Hugo, Docker and Kubernetes are written in Go. More infos about the project here: https://golang.org/project/
yes i did read about smashingmagazine and it is great.
didn’t know the GO was so used serverside.
so we are quite on the safest futureproof side of SSG
last concern: what about CommonMark? because Hugo relies on external library (Blackfriday, as today) to convert markdown into html, and right now it’s not fully CommonMark compliant, right?
i did read https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/5124
but at the end it’s not really clear what is the Hugo direction and/or if Blackfriday 2 will allow 100% CommonMark
we all hope that CommonMark becomes the de facto the Markdown standard, so that we all can rely on different technologies, but the source stay intact for the future
sorry for the long questions.
thank you all and i am looking forward to contribute to this project!
Sorry—a bit off topic: Would it make sense to publish an article for the Hugo News site or for the What is Hugo site summarizing the information above? “Future proof” is a super-common keyword when I try to convince clients of using Hugo (and I have convinced many). It would be a great resource to link to.
(Sorry—I am neither a Go specialist nor a native speaker. So I can not provide such an article.)